A boy’s voice broke mid-aria on a stage in Paris, and the woman who had been more obsessed with him than anyone alive turned and waved him off the stage as if shooing a fly. There was no goodbye, no further letters, no second chance. The greatest composer England had produced in a century, the man who had written music specifically for this child and kept him close for years, simply withdrew his attention like a snuffed candle and never spoke to him again. David Hemmings was barely fourteen years old, and he would spend the rest of his life, until that moving interview filmed weeks before his death, swearing that nothing improper had ever happened between them.
So what exactly happened? And how does a boy go from being the inspiration for a national treasure to a fatal heart attack on a film set in Bucharest, passing through a scandal, four marriages, a fortune in rock and roll money squandered, and a face so beautiful it defined an entire decade before turning into a pair of magnificent eyebrows? Welcome to the secrets of Hollywood. He was born in Guildford, Surrey, on November 18, 1941, in a grim, tense, darkened England during the middle years of the war.
His father was a biscuit salesman who played piano in a dance band, and his mother was a nurse whose musical ambitions were frustrated, so the father passed them on to his son. Kathleen spoiled him; Arthur pushed him relentlessly. By the official records, David Leslie Edward Hemmings was an ordinary suburban child from a modest family. But in every other respect, he was a genius waiting to be noticed.
And at age nine, someone noticed. He had an exceptionally pure, beautiful voice and a remarkable intelligence in how he used it. The English Opera Group, the traveling company at the heart of British musical life, took him on. He toured with them, a child wage earner shuttled between rehearsal rooms and provincial opera houses, suddenly mixing with hardened adults who treated music as sacred ritual.
He was the only figure in short trousers in a highly refined art. The boy who would one day be photographed half-naked among London’s most beautiful women began his career singing, and he became the focus of the most important man in the room. In 1952, when Hemmings was ten, he sang the leading role in The Little Sweep, the children’s opera at the center of the British Let’s Make an Opera project. Two years later came the role that would define his childhood and haunt his life.
In September 1954 in Venice, Benjamin Britten premiered The Turn of the Screw, his chamber opera based on the Henry James novella, a mysterious story about a governess and two children, and whether the dead can corrupt the living. Britten wrote the part of Miles, the beautiful, possibly doomed boy at the center of that corruption, specifically with twelve-year-old David Hemmings in mind. It remains one of the greatest child roles in opera, and Hemmings performed it so brilliantly that many who heard him swore it has never been equaled. For one brief season, he was the most beloved boy soprano in England.
What happened around that role became the talk of the town, the subject of writing, captured on television, and it remains one of the strangest and most controversial relationships in twentieth-century English art. Britten lived openly, at least by the standards of the time, in a close relationship with the tenor Peter Pears, the love of his life. But he was also drawn throughout his career, with unmistakable intensity, to adolescent boys. In the view of those who studied him, thirteen was the ideal age, and he justified his genius for composing children’s music with the suspicious explanation that he was still thirteen himself.
It is exactly as suspicious as it sounds. Hemmings walked into his life at twelve, and Britain fell in love with him the way lovers always do. But there was nothing romantic about it. It was like a predator falling upon easy prey.
For two or three months in 1954, David lived with the composer at Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast, while a private tutor handled his schooling and Britain covered everything else. The training, the gifts, the hospitality, the long and frequent letters. Basil Douglas, the company’s manager, put it plainly: Britten loved David. He was infatuated with him.
Many would argue, and I among them, whether this could even be called love. Calling it love is a contradiction, because love cannot exist when the consequences are dire for one party. The conductor Charles Mackerras, who watched all this closely, made a grave error that suggests an attempt to cover up the situation, portraying the child as the bully and the sensitive artist in his forties as the victim. Hemmings, by his own account, said he was a very handsome young man and that he exploited and enjoyed Britten’s obvious admiration.
Mackerras added that Britten’s behavior was, as he put it, that of a besotted lover, so much so that one might think he eventually acted improperly with him. Then came the statement around which the entire story turns: it was clearly a sexual attraction, but I am sure it was never consummated. This has remained the official position ever since. What makes Hemmings’ lifelong defense of the man so strange is that Britten’s attraction to children was certainly not always a merely theoretical idea.
Years earlier, in 1937, he took a thirteen-year-old boy named Harry Morris on a family seaside holiday in Cornwall. Morris would later insist that the composer entered his room one night and tried to come on to him, that he screamed, that he brandished a chair at him, and that Britten rushed over upon hearing the noise. This is the ambiguity at the heart of the entire story, and it makes Hemmings’ adult testimony striking, because the closest thing to a final verdict comes from Hemmings himself, who protected Britten’s reputation until the very last moment of his life and never wavered. He cheerfully admitted that he shared the composer’s bed.
Yes, he slept in his bed, he said, only because he was scared at night. He had no illusions that Britten desired him. He simply insisted, with a boyish candor that became his hallmark, that matters ended there, and he offered one of the most famous evasive statements in any artistic memoir to settle the question: he said he never felt threatened, because he was, in his words, straighter than Genghis Khan. His final word on the man, given in a documentary interview filmed weeks before his death, was not bitterness but love.
He said Britten was not only a father to him but also a friend. There could not have been a better father or friend. The word father is the one that matters most, at least to Freudian analysts. His relationship with his own father had deteriorated beyond repair, and he publicly stated that the composer was more of a father to him than the man who raised him.
The replacement was total, and that is precisely what made what followed so cruel. Britten’s love for his favorites always ended early, and it always ended in the same brutal way. The boy grows up, his voice deepens, a new pretty child appears in his place, and the warmth is withdrawn completely, without ceremony or mercy. For Hemmings, the moment came with exquisite timing.
Around 1956, on a stage in Paris, during a performance of The Turn of the Screw, the fourteen-year-old opened his mouth to sing the Malo aria and his voice broke in front of everyone. Puberty, which spares no boy soprano, arrived at a critical moment, mid-phrase, mid-performance. Britten was furious. He waved the boy off the stage, and everything ended after years of admiration.
They never spoke again, not once, for the rest of Britten’s life. Years later, as Hemmings, by then tough, burdened, and having lived a hard life, recalled it all on camera, he still wept. It was partly pride at having made such music with such a man, and partly grief at the cruelty of being discarded the moment he was no longer useful. He had loved him as a son, then abandoned him like a piece of decor.
And you can understand why a man who learned at fourteen that affection could be switched off at will might grow up never fully trusting it, handling his emotional life like a series of rooms he entered and left easily over time. So the boy soprano became overnight just a boy, a boy with no clear purpose. He turned to painting, studied at Epsom School of Art, and was good enough to hold his own exhibition at fifteen. He was good enough that every painting hanging on the walls of his 1970 thriller The Walking Stick was his own work.
He drifted back toward acting, though the stage had claimed him. As a teenager, he ran away from home completely and ended up in Austria, performing magic tricks and playing guitar in nightclubs, a fugitive in a dinner jacket spending months scraping by. Then he returned to acting in his late teens, singing in clubs before moving into serious theater. He had been in front of cameras since childhood, so the transition to the screen was natural.
His film debut came in 1954 at thirteen in Ealing’s The Rainbow Jacket, followed by a small role in Otto Preminger’s Saint Joan in 1957, where he appeared behind Jean Seberg. He had a beauty unusual for a film leading man, boyish and slender features, wide, strongly lit eyes, a broad jaw, a face suggesting both dissipation and fragility, as though hiding some secret. He was in reform school at seventeen and married Janista Ovary and became a father at eighteen. Small roles piled up in films like No Trees in the Street, Sink the Bismarck, and Wind of Change, often playing sullen, misunderstood, delinquent youths, a type then becoming fashionable.
Then came that genuinely absurd period of teen musical films in the early sixties, whose titles now sound like lazy parodies of the era: Some People, Live It Up, Be My Guest, and The Girls, where he traded punches with the young actor Oliver Reed, beginning a friendship and drinking partnership that would literally affect their lives until the very end. He had appeared in more than thirty films before he turned twenty-five, barely any of them remembered today. He was also involved in the counterculture before it had that name, smoking cannabis with John Lennon and others while the world was still broadcast in black and white. By 1965, he was a known figure in a small world, a beautiful face with a slightly dangerous tint and no future whatsoever.
Then an Italian arrived who did not like the way David Hemmings looked. Michelangelo Antonioni, the austere master of L’Avventura, La Notte, and L’Eclisse, with his scowl, secured massive MGM financing for an English-language film in London and was searching for a new, unknown, virginal face for the lead. Antonioni hated actorly mannerisms, hated the noise of performers, and instinctively felt David Hemmings was wrong for the part. At their first meeting, he told him, you don’t look right.
You’re too young. Sean Connery had already turned down the role, furious when Antonioni refused to show him the full script, offering instead a seven-page outline that Connery kept in a cigarette tin as a sardonic souvenir. Terence Stamp, freshly nominated for an Oscar, was among the other candidates. The audition was disastrous, or so it seemed, because Antonioni sat through it shaking his head left and right without stopping, which any sensible young actor could only read as a sign that his career was collapsing before his eyes.
Hemmings read it that way. Only much later did he learn the director suffered from a mild nervous tic that moved his head whether he was pleased or not. Hemmings recalled, I left completely depressed and went to the pub and told anyone who would listen, I’ve completely blown this opportunity. His one chance to work with a director he feared was gone.
He was sure of it. He was wrong. He got the part. Blowup was a sensation, making him overnight one of the most famous young men alive.
He played Thomas, a wealthy, gifted fashion photographer in London, loosely inspired by David Bailey, a man who sleeps with models and discards them with the same indifference with which he photographs them, and who convinces himself, after enlarging a series of photographs taken in a park of the models, that he has accidentally recorded a murder. The film is painfully cool, enigmatic, infuriating, and mesmerizing. Its final scene, where Thomas is drawn into a game of tennis played by silent mimes without ball or net until he too begins to hear its bounce, ranks among the most psychologically haunting endings in cinema history. It was also deeply indecent by 1966 standards.
The sequence where Hemmings photographs the model Veruschka sprawled on the floor, snapping image after image as though the camera itself were sex, was among the most erotic scenes ever filmed. Similarly, an afternoon adventure with two aspiring models, one of them the teenage Jane Birkin, produced a kind of full nudity no major Hollywood studio had dared risk, and it helped bring down the Production Code that had constrained American screens for a generation. MGM released the film through a subsidiary to evade its own rules, and it won the Palme d’Or in 1967. The boy who was too young had suddenly become the symbol of swinging London.
He received the circus with dry English wit: I’ve been discovered six times, he said. I think I’ve made it this time. The world around him was as strange and vital as his performance. Antonioni built it from real and borrowed swinging London furniture.
Vanessa Redgrave played the frantic woman in the park, Sarah Miles the neighbor. Veruschka played an exaggerated version of herself, and in the most memorable sequence, The Yardbirds performed, captured in that brief, strange moment when both Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page stood in the same lineup. Antonioni had wanted The Who but was refused, so he settled for The Yardbirds miming a song called Stroll On in a fake club, where Beck, on the director’s instructions, smashed a cheap promotional guitar against his amplifier, then tossed the broken neck into a crowd of young beautiful extras who stood stone-faced until the debris rose into the air, at which point they swooped like hungry gulls. It is a perfect miniature of the entire film, about the longing to possess an image and the worthlessness of the image once possessed.
Hemmings’ Thomas grabs the neck, runs into the street, and tosses it into the gutter the moment no one chases him. The film’s own solution hides in its magnificent arrogance. The murder that dissolves back into film grain and shadows, and the audience that came for a thriller and left bewildered, made it thrilling. It cost MGM less than two million dollars and grossed around twenty million worldwide.
It turned a sleepy-eyed young Englishman into the most photographed youth of an era that was his. But this dazzling success became a heavy personal burden. The thing that opened every door and guaranteed every invitation overshadowed everything else. A perfect early peak from which the only direction was down.
He always refused to romanticize the film or the decade it crystallized, one reason his performance was so good. There is a real coldness beneath the beautiful, indifferent surface that keeps the film from sliding into nostalgia. He truly did not care. What followed was an erratic, often misdirected career for a young star under the world’s gaze who had no idea what to do with the attention.
He was paid a substantial sum by Warner Bros. to play Mordred, the wicked bastard son, in Joshua Logan’s bloated, tedious 1967 Camelot, opposite Richard Harris and his frequent co-star Vanessa Redgrave. Critics, who praised almost everything about that film, were brutal about his singing. What a painful irony for a man whose voice had once surpassed every chorister in England.
He appeared as the evil brother of a young woman named Sharon Tate in the mystery thriller Eye of the Devil, the same film that gave Tate her first significant screen role. A few years later, Tate was murdered in the most gruesome crime in Hollywood history, adding that horror to Hemmings’ career. He returned to work with Redgrave and collaborated with the brilliant director Tony Richardson on The Charge of the Light Brigade in 1968, playing Captain Louis Nolan in a magnificent, bold anti-war epic about military folly, admired by everyone but barely seen by anyone. That same year, he gave a striking performance as Dildano, the desperate revolutionary, opposite Jane Fonda as Barbarella and Roger Vadim as the villain.
That film was so steeped in absurdity it outshone most of its more serious science fiction contemporaries. In 1969, he starred in Clive Donner’s Alfred the Great, playing the burdened Saxon king as a reluctant, conflicted monk, a bold and deeply unglamorous choice that did not help his box office appeal. In Alfred the Great, Hemmings played the other Hemmings, that ladies’ man who viewed every film star as an opportunity, one of his most damning stories. Cast opposite the actress Prunella Ransome, he decided, as he later wrote, if Prunella is ready, so am I.
He resolved to test this theory on their first scripted kiss by following method acting technique. I was wrong, he admitted. I was shocked by her angry scream and sharp tongue. Around 1967, in one of the great lost opportunities of film history, Hemmings was a candidate to play Alex in an early, failed attempt at Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, with a treatment by Terry Southern, camerawork by Michael Cooper, and the Rolling Stones surrounding him as close friends.
That version collapsed when the British censor made clear he would never approve it. The role waited four years, not a million, for Stanley Kubrick and Malcolm McDowell. Meanwhile, Hemmings did what every sixties star did and released an album. In 1967, he traveled to Los Angeles and recorded David Hemmings Happens with members of The Birds, produced by their mentor Jim Dickson, including a song called Backstreet Mirror written for him by Jane Clark.
It is a period piece, not a disaster. It sounds like a man with real singing talent, in keeping with the era’s conviction that anyone famous could do almost anything. By then, he had realized the truth that would guide the rest of his career: money and power in cinema lay behind the camera, not in front of it. In 1967, he co-founded Hemdale Film Corporation with a shrewd former insurance salesman named John Daly, the son of a London documents department worker.
Hemdale began life as a tax shelter and talent management firm as much as a studio. They managed famous rock bands like Yes and Black Sabbath, acquired worldwide theatrical rights to Lionel Bart’s Oliver, then moved into film production, with Ken Russell’s Tommy and Robert Altman’s Images among their early works. Over time, under Daly’s management, the company became one of the most important independent production companies in film history, the company behind The Terminator, Platoon, and The Last Emperor, the company that gave early breaks to Keanu Reeves, Denzel Washington, and Julia Roberts, and that won two consecutive Best Picture Oscars. There was one catch.
Hemmings sold his stake early, before the profits materialized. The man whose name supplied the first syllable of Hemdale had given up one of the greatest fortunes in modern cinema history, leaving his seat in the back row while his old partner built an empire upon it. He pretended indifference. He had little patience for producing anyway, dismissing it as an unappreciated task like managing hotels, before adding that unfortunately there were not many good hotel managers.
His private life meanwhile ran at the same reckless, charming, destructive pace as his career. His first marriage collapsed under his rise; it never had a chance. In 1968, he married the American actress Gayle Hunnicutt, a kind, ambitious Texan. For a time, they were one of the most famous transatlantic screen couples, a pairing he summarized with his usual modesty: we were the poor man’s Taylor and Burton.
They moved to Malibu in search of the sun and Hollywood beach houses that time had forgotten. In 1972, he began directing and cast Gayle as the lead in his first feature, the thriller Runaway. They had a son, Nolan, who grew up to be an actor too. Then the marriage collapsed spectacularly, in Hemmings’ signature style.
Gayle Hunnicutt did not lose her husband to a single affair but to an endless series of them. The marriage broke when she discovered he was involved with his co-star in The Walking Stick, Samantha Edgar, and simultaneously with his secretary, a young woman named Prudence de Casembroot. The affair with the secretary was no passing whim. When the divorce went through in the mid-seventies, Hemmings married her in 1976, giving the relationship some legitimacy, but it was a false legitimacy.
New marriage vows did not restrain him in the slightest. During his third marriage, he pursued other affairs, most notably with Tessa Dahl, the actress and writer, daughter of Roald Dahl, a woman whose romantic life had touched Peter Sellers and Bryan Ferry. Along with his memoirs, when they appeared, Gayle felt no embarrassment about any of it. He wrote about hiding half-naked in his assistant’s closet to escape his wife, and about the compulsive, chronic womanizing that accompanied his chronic alcoholism.
Friends and critics agreed, never denied, that he was a serial womanizer and an alcoholic, though he refused to use the word, a man of tremendous charm who left a long trail of destruction behind his smile. That boy abandoned the moment his voice changed became a man who always left the room before anyone could leave him. In the end, he had six children spread across those relationships. Janista Ovary gave him a daughter, Deborah, when he was barely more than a boy.
Gayle Hunnicutt gave him Nolan, named after Captain Louis Nolan, the role he had just played in The Charge of the Light Brigade. That is, he named his son after a cavalry officer condemned to death, charging into absurd annihilation at the start of a catastrophe. It was a choice that carried a fate neither father nor son could have anticipated. The child grew up to be the actor Nolan Hemmings.
Prudence de Casembroot gave him four more children: a daughter, Charlotte, and three sons, George, Edward, and William. He was a perpetually absent father, always working, always traveling, always about to leave. The pattern of his marriages mirrored his style of fatherhood: the same enormous warmth and genuine love undermined by his inability to stay present. His work scattered through the seventies in every direction, as it usually does for a clever, easily bored man with financial troubles and an unbridled sex drive.
His energy went far beyond cinema. Unusually for a man of his lifestyle, he was an active political force and a supporter of the British Liberal Party, attending meetings between Pinter’s circle and film screenings. Another identity for a man who seemed to accumulate them the way others accumulated debts. He gave one of his finest performances as the hunted hero in Dario Argento’s Deep Red in 1975, a dazzling, startling film today beloved by giallo fans.
He appeared in disaster films like Richard Lester’s Juggernaut in 1974 and in prestigious literary adaptations, including Franklin J. Schaffner’s Islands in the Stream, the Hemingway film starring George C. Scott, and an opulent version of The Prince and the Pauper. That same year, his deep voice narrated Rick Wakeman’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth, a magnificent fantasy from Prague.
He also co-wrote Pasadena in 1973, a hit for Australian singer John Paul Young. He even played Bertie Wooster in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1975 musical Jeeves, one of that composer’s few failures. Yet he directed most of his work with the same erratic enthusiasm. His second feature, The Fourteen, also released as The Wild Little Bunch, won a Silver Bear at the 1973 Berlin Film Festival, a genuine and serious achievement.
His 1978 film Just a Gigolo was not. He directed David Bowie alongside the legendary Marlene Dietrich in her final role. Bowie dismissed the whole affair as my 32 films about Elvis Presley rolled into one, it was not good. In other words, he moved to Australia and directed the horror film The Survivor, then directed Race for the Yankee Zephyr.
Eventually he moved to America and, ironically, became a reliable, industrious, anonymous director of legendary eighties television series, credited with episodes of Magnum, P. I. , The A-Team, Airwolf, and even the pilot of Quantum Leap. In Airwolf, he played the brilliant mad scientist villain Dr.
Moffett with gusto, a name the studio secretary kept misspelling from episode to episode. He even returned in an episode of the horror series Tales from the Crypt to the very obsession that had made him famous, playing a domineering surveillance master who watched the world through multiple screens. The voyeur had exploded into new form as an institutional voyeur. The face that had hung on the walls of millions of bedrooms in 1967 had shrunk to a name in small letters in American prime time.
He faced the fact, as he faced every fact, with a joke. He said, people thought I was dead. But I wasn’t. I was just directing the A-Team.
It is the funniest thing a faded film star could say, and nearly the saddest, and he was fully aware of both sides. The drinking, begun in fun, had long since become the dominant feature of his life. He and Oliver Reed, friends since those early silly films, formed a legendary and fearsome pair of riotous rakes, two handsome Englishmen roaming the hotel bars of the world for thirty years. When Reed died in 1999, dropping dead after an afternoon session in a Malta pub during the filming of Gladiator, the symmetry was lost on no one, especially Hemmings, who happened to be in that very film and who would follow his old friend to a sudden death on a film set just four years later.
They were alike, and they left the same way, working and drinking in a foreign land without warning. Indeed, Gladiator returned him to the spotlight after nearly two decades of working as a journeyman. In 2000, Ridley Scott cast him as Cassius, the arrogant master of ceremonies of the Colosseum, and the audience that had loved that slender, intense boy stared at the heavyset, hoarse-voiced man with the thick, hooked eyebrows and did not immediately recognize him. The role was not huge, but it was memorable.
The film won Best Picture, and offers flooded back. He enjoyed the strangeness of it. He said, they saw me in Gladiator and said, he’s still alive! My God, suddenly I’ve acted in eight films in the last sixteen months.
Then he added a line that sounded, as he looked back, as if the universe were clearing its throat, perhaps I won’t act in another film until I’m seventy, if I live that long. In his sixties, he was at his busiest, and perhaps his best. He was one of the grand old men of British screen acting, alongside Michael Caine, Tom Courtenay, and Albert Finney, the surviving giants of his generation. He appeared in Tony Scott’s Spy Game, in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York as the corrupt Mr.
Schermerhorn, and as Frank Sinatra’s lawyer in the Australian comedy The Night We Called It a Day. He gave a villainous performance in the dystopian thriller Equilibrium opposite Christian Bale, and appeared with Sean Connery in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, closing a circle that had begun nearly forty years earlier when Connery rejected the role that made him. But the most significant performance, revealing his artistic maturity, was in Fred Schepisi’s 2001 Last Orders, a tender, meditative adaptation of Graham Swift’s novel about a group of elderly London men who drive to scatter the ashes of a late friend. Hemmings played Lenny, the gloomy former boxer wrestling with his ordinary, irreplaceable, wasted life, alongside Caine, Courtenay, Bob Hoskins, and Ray Winstone.
The film aimed for a final poignant touch. In flashback scenes, Hemmings’ son Nolan played the young Lenny. The father and son, the same man at the beginning and end of his life. For an actor who had spent his life running from the memories of his youth, there could have been no greater final role than this.
He even finally began to reassess his life, sitting down to write the witty, caustic memoir he would call Blow-Up and Other Exaggerations. He never lived to see the book published. In late 2003, he was in Romania, in Bucharest, shooting a supernatural thriller then called Samantha’s Child, later released as Blessed. On December 3, 2003, he finished filming his scenes for the day, and as he had finished filming scenes for half a century, he turned and walked back toward his dressing room.
On the way, his heart stopped. Paramedics tried to revive him where he fell, but they failed. He was sixty-two. His wife, Lucy Williams, whom he had married just a year earlier, his fourth and final wife, was at his side.
The man who had joked that he might not live to seventy had been telling the truth. He died exactly as he had lived: on a film set, mid-production, in his shoes, having finished shooting his scenes. It was either the cruellest way for such a man to go or the kindest, and perhaps both. He was about to begin shooting a film opposite John Malkovich.
His memoir was published the following year. The film he died making was dedicated to his memory. He was buried in the churchyard of St. Peter’s Church at Blackland near Cole in Wiltshire, far from the opera houses of a childhood spent on the shores of his youth.
He left behind complex feelings weighing on four former wives and six children. The producer of Last Orders, Nick Powell, expressed everyone’s sentiment when he said the saddest part was simply that his acting career was at its peak. Blowup had not only brought David Hemmings fame but had forever fixed his image as the symbol of a fascinating twentieth-century moment: the image of the handsome, bored young man with a camera in London who briefly and mistakenly thought he had solved the problem of youth. The voice that broke on a Paris stage and ended one life became the prelude to another, stranger, longer, and more complicated life.
Britten abandoned him because he matured. In the end, cinema loved him for the same reason.